


Make It Feel Like Home

by acquaintedwithvice



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drug Use, F/M, Implied/Referenced Incest, Incest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 04:29:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13896270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acquaintedwithvice/pseuds/acquaintedwithvice
Summary: Transdimensional travel is a funny thing. As far as Rick runs, consequences always manage to follow him home.Playlists:https://8tracks.com/virtueofvice/space_trashhttps://8tracks.com/virtueofvice/n-o-t-_-t-o-d-a-yhttps://8tracks.com/virtueofvice/i-always-thought-i-was-the-good-guy





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> _“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”_  
>  ― Vladimir Nabokov, _Lolita_

In hindsight it was fairly obvious, from a scientific standpoint. A certain number of things in every reality were truly randomized, unpredictable variables thrown in by a meddling _ex machina_ that even he could not predict or control. In most cases, however, the same patterns repeated over and over again - the same butterflies caused the same hurricanes, leopards couldn't change their spots, and he was, almost without exception, a filthy drunk bastard.

Jerry recalled prom night as a glorious triumph, arriving at the high school gymnasium with the homecoming queen stuffed into the passenger seat of his station wagon, her oversized skirt in his undersized car like some sort of outrageous sugary confection, spilling over in poufs of lace and stiff teenage pride. Beth Sanchez had done him a favor by dating him; for reasons she now couldn't recall - perhaps to make an ex jealous, or to subconsciously reinforce her foster mother's unflinching belief that all men deserve a woman's emotional labor - and whatever else they can carve out and carry away. 

She entered the dance, head held high like royalty - her father's daughter; scorn in her bones. Jerry gripped her arm clumsily, knocking a few petals loose from her corsage, treading on the hem of her dress as he dragged her beneath the arch of faux flowers for a photograph. Rather than stand still and smiling, as she did, he raised a fist in outrageous triumph, the conquering hero. The absurdity of it made her gut clench. Under the weight of all those eyes, prickling over her skin like a chilly draft, she sensed the keen embarrassment that only teenagers can feel and adults never forget. 

Thankfully, blessedly, some thoughtful miscreant had spiked the punch. 

The Sanchez genome strand carried with it a certain tolerance for alcohol, but the Smith gene carried two left feet. After two or three failed attempts on the dance floor and an aching instep, Beth excused herself to hover by the punch bowl while Jerry presumably berated himself in the men's. With nothing to do but sip punch, sugary-sweet "Hawaiian Red" flavor doing nothing to disguise the burn of cheap vodka, the colored lights above the bandstand soon took on a certain haloed effect. When Jerry emerged, she greeted him with a greater degree of warmth, tottering a little on her heels and offering him a drink in a languid hand. He smiled, the foolish doe-eyed smile that she could sometimes trick herself into believing she loved. 

The motel room he had booked for the occasion was spartan, to say the least; a roadside motor court with only an ice machine and a cracked asphalt parking lot for amenities. The en-suite bathroom was tiny, the quilt on the bed a rough polyester blend that invited cigarette burns. A small sign rested next to an empty plastic holder on the nightstand - _Thank you for choosing the Sunset Motel. Leave suggestions, questions and comments on these cards and enjoy the complimentary mints._ No mints. No cards. No comments. 

The boy was drunk; fumbling at the fastenings of her dress incompetently before she pushed his hands away with an almost inaudible sigh and hiked up her skirt. He was overeager in the way that only youth can be, and so she really shouldn't have been surprised at the outcome. Yet she was - slightly shocked and slightly irritated, an emotion she would come to be very familiar with over the coming years; stiff with revulsion at the sticky wetness already cooling in the crux of her inner thigh as Jerry shuddered and twitched atop her, huffing out a whine. 

He rolled off of her, grinning widely, clearly unaware of his lackluster performance past the glow of liquor and endorphins. She rose and went to the bathroom, stripping off her rumpled dress and washing off the mess with her brow slightly furrowed. Without the gown, she was left in the slip that had been beneath it, a slim line of red silk and stockings of white, feet already starting to hurt in red patent leather pumps. She pulled the pins from her hair, leaving it a riot of tousled curls around her shoulders, the fancy up-do she'd spent hours on undone in a moment. Emerging from the bathroom, she was only a little surprised to discover her paramour already asleep, sprawled out atop the duvet and snoring softly. 

She studied him for a long moment; appearing to arrive at a decision. She pulled his black tux blazer from the one uncomfortable chair in the room, shrugging it on and slipping the room key into the breast pocket, and, taking baby steps on her heels to avoid breaking the silence, left the room. 

The motel was in a seedy district of town, near an empty factory that reverberated with sound. In an alley between the two, she imagined she heard the thud of heavy footsteps, and a woman's loud but quickly muffled gasp - a mugging? Her peering eyes caught a swirl of shadows, hulking silhouettes, the glint of red hair. She hurried onward, drawing the blazer tighter around herself. No hero, was Beth Sanchez. 

The factory loomed ahead. As she drew near to the large, blocky concrete structure, she noticed people milling about outside, smoking and passing bottles wrapped in brown paper back and forth. They ignored her almost entirely, a few eyes passing over her curiously but no hands reaching out to bar her way, as she passed through them and beyond the yawning threshold. 

It was dark within, but not as dark as she had imagined. Several large floodlights had been set up and connected to generators. A stage had been fashioned from assorted, doubtless stolen, construction materials, mainly plywood and spray-paint, and some instruments that looked as if they had seen better days rested atop it, awaiting the hands that would play them. A small crowd milled about, and the number of them wearing leather and the general aroma of anti-establishment in the air made her suspect she had stumbled into an underground punk concert. 

She wandered up an old steel staircase to what had once been the foreman's office and listened at the door. There were voices within, indistinctly male, likely a little inebriated. The edge of her mouth quirked. Her own buzz was wearing off, and the part of her that was reckless and defiant thought she'd see if these fine fellows had anything to share. Raising her hand, she hesitated for only a moment before knocking. 

"Alright, alright, that's the escort," said a rough but somehow intriguing male voice. 'You guys get the- get the fuck out of here! _Haa,_ Squanchy, you freak, come back for the show man..." A weird piercing sound interrupted the conversation, as if a high-pitched vacuum had been switched on, then off, and after another long moment the door opened. 

Beth looked up into slightly bloodshot, grey eyes under an unruly mane of silver and stumbled back a step, her hand gripping the rail instinctively lest she tumble down the stairs. The years narrowed to a pinpoint and vanished, and she found herself whispering through barely parted lips, " _Daddy?_ "

The man, tall and lean and looking exactly as her father had the day he'd left her, caught her wrist and pulled her in. "Damn, they sent a freaky one this time. Nice." He left her standing in the doorway and went to pour another measure of scotch into a red solo cup. The office had apparently been converted into a dressing room; home to an old couch, a rickety mirrored vanity, a coffee table and a sideboard littered with tiny white parcels. Turning around and leaning against the shoddy doorframe, he looked her up and down. He offered no pick-up line or attempt to impress her, only "Huh, usually get a redhead. Blonde's okay I guess. You do blow?" Beth nodded jerkily, afraid to do anything else, and he chuckled roughly before shutting the door on her childhood.

It was impossible, of course - there was no way he could be the same man, the same Rick that had walked out the door and never looked back ten years before. It was impossible, that he hadn't aged a day in the interim. And to be fronting a punk band here, of all places, on this night, in this time? It beggared belief. She put it from her mind, and put her lips to the bottle he offered her gratefully, welcoming the burn. Welcoming the oblivion. 

"Whoa baby slow down; I'm paying for you awake not passed out on the floor. Though I guess it doesn't matter that much." He shrugged, tapping out a rhythm on the sideboard before bending at the waist - hipbones lean and sharp above his low-slung jeans - and snorting up a line of white.

"Can I have some?" She heard herself ask, as if in a dream. He grinned wolfishly. 

"Now we're talking. C'mere blondie." 

She rose to her feet and stepped closer, the room swaying like a ship in a storm, and she reached out a hand to steady herself. He caught her wrist and drew her fast against himself, body long and hard and smelling of liquor and leather and ozone. She opened her mouth to speak but no words came out, only a breathless squeak. 

"You remind me of someone I used to know," he muttered, bitterness on his tongue in scotch and cigarettes, and before she could reply, could say that the feeling was mutual, he was pulling her thin slip over her head, ripping the white lacy rayon panties that were supposed to be for Jerry. She was gasping and drunk, and when he turned her back to him and bent her over the sideboard, she complied, trembling as she felt him fumble with his belt buckle behind her, long fingers brushing her heat. His cock pressed against her backside, semi-hard, and she felt a sprinkle like snowflakes on her skin, the scrape of a fingernail down her spine, and shivered. 

Behind her, he grinned salaciously, holding a hundred up to his nose. "Oh, yeah, this is gonna be awesome," he informed her, and bending, inhaled the eightball of cocaine he had railed up her back. He gripped her hips with large hands, long fingers biting into tender flesh, and ran his tongue over her delicately protruding vertebrae, all the way up to her neck, where he sank his teeth in and she cried out. Reaching in front of her, he pulled a small hand mirror scattered with the white powder beneath her face; then tangled his fingers in her hair, palm firm at the base of her skull. His breath was hot in her ear as he panted and pressed her face down to the mirror. Beth gasped, squirmed, then gave in, breathing in the drug and welcoming the burn in her sinuses and the sudden spinning behind her skull. He thrust into her with a grunt, much bigger than anything she'd been prepared for and apparently unaware that he was fucking a daisy-fresh schoolgirl and not the escort he'd ordered. Beth gripped the edges of the sideboard, nails biting into the worn wood as tears blurred her vision, and held on. 

It would have been easier, she would think later, if she had derived no pleasure from that night; if it had been simply a mistaken encounter that she emerged from a little tattered and worn but otherwise unchanged. But such was not the case. Her mind recalled, as if on a film loop that grew faded with time but refused to stop replaying, the way her legs had trembled and then failed her as she clung to the sideboard and wailed out the only word she could think of - _"Daddy!"_   The way she'd been flooded with molten heat as he cursed and came inside her, hips jerking hard and erratic. 

He'd withdrawn in as businesslike a manner as one could imagine, slapping her backside companionably and tossing her a towel as if they had been involved in a sporting event together. He pressed a wad of bills into her palm, handed her her clothes and showed her to the door. Walking as if in a daze, Beth wandered back to the motel room and let herself in, finding Jerry still passed out in the bed they had shared. She slipped in under the blankets, suddenly chilled to the bone. In the morning, the only evidence that the previous evening's events had not been a dream was the money clutched in her hand and the sticky leavings between her thighs. She showered to forget the one and bought textbooks for college to try and move past the other.

Of course, there was one more souvenir, which showed up six weeks later, in two little blue lines on a plastic stick in the bathroom of the animal shelter where she volunteered for credit on her college transcripts. 

Suddenly Beth was tired. Tired of fighting for love, for achievement, to transcend the bonds of the mundane that had been foisted upon her the moment she became another statistic - fatherless mixed-race child raised in the foster system, intelligent but doomed to mediocrity. She broke the good news to Jerry, who had no difficulty whatsoever in believing that the happy accident was the result of his heroic biological contribution, and they were married in short order. The convenient lie was slightly less shameful than the unimaginable alternative.

The rest, as they say, is history.

~~~~~~~

The intervention wasn't necessary in every universe. In most dimensions, Jerry had managed to seal the deal on prom night, ruining his daughter's life the old-fashioned way, without any additional assistance from Rick himself. The Rick responsible - a younger version of himself, from a dimension where he'd stayed in the Flesh Curtains longer and played the punk scene rather than joining the fight against the Federation - was long gone. C-137 had looked him up after discovering the genetic... discrepancy... In this particular household. But the doppelganger had been found dead in a hotel on Klaxon 7 years before, a needle in his arm and a ginger hooker in his bed to no one's real surprise. C-137 developed a synaptic dampening drug that kept Beth's firstborn docile and her intellect suppressed, dosing her consistently from an early age, confident that the child would grow to be more or less identical to all the other Summers in the multiverse - redheaded, comely, and hopelessly mundane. 

But then he had destroyed his dimension of residence, left it so dramatically fucked that it was simpler to just bin it entirely... And found himself there. Of all places. In that garage. In that house. In another man's shoes. Filling the voids he himself had left, by dying or leaving or getting drunk and impregnating a teenage girl. It wasn't him but it was, and the burden of that knowledge - of all his knowledge - settled even more firmly on his shoulders like the weight of the world on Atlas. His brow furrowed, he sighed, and withdrew his flask as he left the yard and its freshly packed graves, entering the house with Morty trailing, dazed, along behind him.

"Hey, Grandpa Rick-"

"Fuck off, Summer." He snarled, and stalked past her into the living room, intent on getting gloriously drunk.


	2. Baby You Were My Picket Fence

He remembered when Summer - _his_ Summer, not that it mattered; he is sure this one has heard the joke by now - first began to realize her grandfather was not the paragon of virtue her mother believed him to be. She was all of seven years old, her shaky faith in the divine already beginning to waver when Rick first darkened the family doorstep. Not yet a permanent installation in the family circus, he had dropped by under some pretense or another; in actuality just looking for a comfortable spot to layover for a few weeks whilst he waited for his latest galactic gamble to pay off.

He sat drinking a beer on the back porch, tinkering with some obscure device seemingly assembled from a tin can, a battery and sheer willpower; when she emerged from the house, slamming the screen door behind her. Above their heads, cry thin and distant despite the balmy afternoon's open window, little Morty - always a sensitive child, napping away the afternoon swelter - started wailing at the sound. She slumped down on the steps beside him, scabbed knees drawn up to her chest, childish features in a ferocious scowl as she blew her auburn hair out of her eyes with a vigor that implied the straight-cut bangs had personally wronged her. Rick ignored her for a long moment, staring out across the yard at the chaotic clouds of midges dancing in the golden sunlight; but she persisted, discontent rolling off her in waves. The row had been spectacular - her parents, specifically Beth, for she had the spine for it, had grounded her - some girlish sin enough to keep her shut in the house for a week at the height of summer. Finally he took a sip of his beer, set it aside and said, "God and the Devil walk into a bar, they make a bet. The devil says, 'God, old man, I'll make you a deal. I'll bet you we'll see more naked titties before the end of the night than you have since Sodom.'"

Summer's interest piqued, his casual use of blasphemous profanity causing her gaze to slide to one side, encompassing his lean profile in her periphery. "Naturally, God threatened them with hell if they didn't stay modest. But Satan promised to do them a solid - he'd _never_ let them in if they showed him the goods." As she puzzled over this, he polished off his beer, crunching the can satisfyingly between strong fingers and sending it sailing out over Jerry's perfectly trimmed lawn. "Punchline is, rebellion's profitable, kid, and infinitely more satisfying. Morality's just a spanking for suckers."

"Shut up Grandpa, that did _not_ happen." She informed him authoritatively, ponytail bouncing. 

Rick shrugged. "You're probably right, kid." He said. "I woulda heard about a party that wild."

She refused to stay grounded after that, spinning off into infinite variables of the same saucy, uncontrollable girl - and then young woman - an infinity of Summers, all branded by his influence in one way or another, repeating across dimensions like a carbon copy that never faded or lost its edge. 

No matter how many times he did this, it never got any simpler. Humans were herd animals, adapted to gravitate toward the dominant member; to submit and show their soft underbellies and best breeding grounds to the strongest among them. The residents of this dimension didn't even know their alpha had been dispatched, replaced by an impostor, and still they clamored for his attention like wild horses in spring. He vented his frustration in higher pursuits and drowned his distraction in alcohol. Whenever possible.

The possible, however, was something warped and distorted by the lens of an American suburbia's reality. Beth viewed him through rose-colored glasses but the glasses would remain on for only as long as she thought him a family man, subject to the rhythms of the household - involved, however distantly, with the ebb and flow of the people around him. It made him want to swallow his death ray.

He almost envied his other self, daydreams colored with the ghost of him; draped like an incubus over the image of his daughter as a young woman that overlaid her like a negative image, a frayed silk curtain that had once been fine, pulling at her tired jagged edges. Absence may well make the heart grow fonder, but his had drained the color from her, leaving her weak and damaged like a priceless painting after a flood, all the complex shading and rich depth that had made her herself running out like cheap dye into puddles on the floor. He wanted to ruin her just so he could forget how he'd already ruined her; erasing the memory of a bombed-out building by pulverizing it to ash. _Dust to dust._

He often wondered what his life would be like, if he had taken the road less traveled. How many grains of sand he would have left in his hourglass, if he hadn't tipped so many of them out running from the Federation. How many friends, lovers, old enemies made soft at the edges like worn polaroids; would still be alive if he hadn't given up on giving up and decided to actually give a fuck about something for a change. More fool him. He would have been much the same, he was sure - same as all of them - traipsing across the universe, eating other people's porridge and leaving used needles in their beds. Punk Rick, as C-137 mentally referred to him with what approached affection, had been a maverick even by Rick standards. But mavericks didn't know how to run, didn't know how to hide, and invariably died young. You couldn't be a maverick and a coward. Not at the same time.

When he'd discovered Sanchez-level brainwaves in the infant Summer here; a frequency far too high for any average American child let alone the spawn of his daughter's Cro-Magnon manservant... He wasn't sure which aspect of his reaction he should examine more closely - the fact that he felt only a little surprise, as if all this had somehow been destined if only by sheer dint of his reprobate influence on the universe. Or the fact that, for a moment, staring into the middle distance as he nearly burned off the tip of his finger with a laser precision cutting tool; he wasn't entirely sure the child wasn't his.

It wasn't, of course. Proving the matter in any number of ways was the work of a few moments for a brain already occupied with a half-dozen other more significant operations. He quickly performed the required calculations and then opened his flask, congratulating himself on basic human decency. _A real win, Rick._ He thought wearily, long fingertips tapping the brushed steel with manic energy. It wasn't that he particularly /recalled/ fucking someone that looked an awful lot like the teenage daughter he'd left behind in every sense one could abandon a person. It was that he couldn't necessarily say with any certainty that he hadn't. Fortunately, science answered the tough questions for him, as always. A friend in need.

He wanted nothing to do with the raising of the Summer; it going entirely against his nature to clean up another Rick's mess. He hated himself too much to be that charitable. Despite himself, however, he was compelled by the occasional urge to check in. Perhaps it was because the dimension's proximity to his own on the similarity register made it a prime target for relocation in the event he needed to run again - as it turned out he'd had. Or perhaps it was because he himself had been a gifted child in a stagnant home, and knew the wretched burden of it - a brilliant mind in a cage too small to even turn around in. He would never speak the words aloud, would never grant himself the mercy even of forming the thought - but he knew what his child self had felt, in his heart of hearts. So he made her stupid - made her _normal._ Vaccinated her against her own intelligence as if he was protecting her from smallpox, a small needle once every few years, administered in secret while the household slept, preventing the onset of genius. He saw her on these nights, a sleeping princess pricked with a cursed spindle, and never in between. Superficially she looked almost identical to every other Summer in existence. As long as she did nothing to draw attention to herself, both she and this - his primary backup dimension, another empty dollhouse awaiting the puppeteer - would be safe. As long as she remained stupid - _normal_ \- she drew no attention whatsoever, even from her own hapless guardians. And so it went.

Rick grimaced, mid-shelf scotch he'd swiped from Jerry's "home office" revisiting unpleasantly. Examining his own motivations was bad for his digestion. He slugged back another swallow and bent to his work, resolved to avoid the household for the remainder of the day. They were getting on his nerves already, in absentia.


	3. Hold Me Tight (Or Don't)

Midnight came early for the rest of the house; lesser minds already winding down for the evening in their disparate nests, hunched over glowing laptop screens or the cheery muted whistle of a candy-themed puzzle app. Some weary souls were asleep already, tucked away in the somnolent embrace of red wine and goosedown. Not so for summer. She sat on the formica of the kitchen counter, chilly and polished from her mother's endless efforts; idly scrolling through Instagram, waiting for her latest selfie to rack up more likes before posting another. Her bare feet dangled, toes polished a deep mulberry, legs swaying just a little to the beat in her headphones. Thus distracted, our intrepid millennial heroine failed to notice when Rick stalked into the kitchen, prowling closer with only the ambient light above the sink illuminating his approach.

Finally cognizant of a forbidding presence encroaching upon her territory, the scent of alcohol and smoke drawing her attention like a distant forest fire; Summer looked up. Rick hovered over her, looming tall and dark with the dim fluorescent at his back casting his long features into unreadable shadows. She removed her headphones, bubblegum pop muffled and tinny as the warm plastic - trendy pink cans, what the popular girls wore - curved against the back of her neck.

"Can I help you?" She demanded, tone dripping with sarcasm and offensively officious.

Rick merely glared, indicating the cabinet over her head with a tilt of his angular jaw. "Need a glass, princess." The honorific reflected her own sarcasm, wrapped it up in cotton candy and razor blades and cast it right back.

Summer tilted her head at him, all naked knees and gently sloping shoulders and soft pink mouth twisted up in a sneer. "Uh-huh? You can reach it." Rick was an invader in her home, a toxin that the natural antibodies - accountability, decency, common sense - had proven unable or unwilling to eradicate. Let him get his own glass.

Irritated, Rick placed himself deliberately into her space, choosing to remain ignorant of the way her spine subtly straightened, shoulders gliding back and elevating her perky breasts beneath the soft pink cotton of her t-shirt. _Ignorance is bliss._ Blissful, also, was the smooth luminous skin of her bare legs, heels pressed against the cabinet, suddenly tense and immobile as he stepped between her thighs. Summer held her breath, canting her eyes downward to the phone in her hands; pretended disinterest as brittle as glass. He existed, as ever, in her periphery - the long line of him reaching up, up, up into the cabinet above her and inexorably drawing her gaze. Long fingers wrapped around a hidden bottle of vodka, a trove hidden successfully from everyone else in the household that shared his gin-soaked genes, and brought it down. Screwing off the top, he swallowed a generous measure directly from the bottle - on second thought, no glass required.

Summer ignored the licking of heat low in her belly, counting on the dim light to hide her rosy cheeks. _He could hold both of my wrists in one hand._ Flashing him a mischievous smile, she handed over the phone, camera open. "Take a picture for me while you're up there."

Rick took another swallow of his vodka, hidden elixir already beginning to work its magic. He blinked slowly, accepting the phone but making no further motions toward compliance. "Why?"

Her response was flippant, as artificial as her candy-coated nails filed to sharp points. "You're so tall, you'll make me look skinny."

He snorted, shadowed expression somehow still conveying his derision. "You're not even fat." He informed her bluntly, candor one of his many virtues.

"Beside the point." She reached out and tapped the phone with one outstretched finger, the tip with its coral claw curving over the slim device like a talon. A dragon, preening over her digital horde. "Come on, do it. Unless you can't figure out how a phone works, _Grandpa_."

Titles were weapons in this family, cast out like caltrops beneath stumbling feet; and she sneered as she bestowed it, making to snatch the phone back in contempt. Rick danced away, leaning back and holding the coveted toy high out of her reach. The escape maneuver pressed his narrow hips to her inner thigh, gently nudging her legs apart; but he certainly didn't notice the way her pupils grew round and black at the contact. _Sure._

"Alright, brat; hold still." One thing could be said for the family Sanchez - they knew how to play to their strengths. Rick had his brain, a dubious blessing; Beth had her big blue eyes, crystal aquamarine that filled with tears seemingly on command; and Summer... She knew what she looked like. She'd inherited her mother's sultry features and tight figure, and all of his deviousness. He pitied any mere mortals that crossed her path, weak spirits destined to be consumed and cast aside as husks.

But for the moment, she was docile; all that raw sensuality contained - but just barely -as she preened and posed. The scoop neckline of her oversized shirt fell in delicate folds, spilling to her hips and warm mobile thighs; the curve and shadow of her chest barely visible but nonetheless alluring. Her long neck, soft and white - like her mother's, like a swan in a slaughterhouse - was invitingly vulnerable as she pouted up at the camera. He snapped the picture, shutter opening and closing in time with his fathomless eyes; a dextrous swipe and tap of his fingers forwarding the image to his own number before handing the phone back to her. His throat was burning for a drink, belly hollow and hot; and he stepped away, taking a deep swallow as she inspected his art and posted the photo with a conspiratorial smirk.

"Thanks," she cooed prettily, liberated limbs loose and coltish as she hopped down from the countertop and sauntered away, head bobbing slightly to the rhythm in her headphones.

"Don't mention it." Rick muttered, stalking off to his own lair; stolen prize in tow. In the darkness of the little closet he called home, he opened the message he'd sent to himself, tiny replica of the spoiled Sanchez scion bright and inviting on the illuminated screen. The pale artificial glow, tinged with hues of pink and cerulean, cast great looming shadows on the walls and scattered papers, and on the tired lines of his face. _You're fucked, old man._


	4. Soda Pop and Ritalin

The unmistakable, cacophonous din of Interdimensional Cable filtered through the cheap pasteboard of his closet door, Rick twisted into impossible contortions on his thin cot, one arm stretched overhead, tingling with pins and needles as the noise dragged him resentfully into the realm of the living. The room - half walk-in storage, half predator's den complete with assorted detritus decorating the walls and floor - was stiflingly hot, the air rank with the ghost of his own ten thousand exhalations. Turning prone, he reached out for the doorknob, attempting to throw the door open and grant his laboring lungs some relief - but his fingers, numb and clammy, slipped on the smooth metal and he tumbled out of bed in a sprawl of too-long limbs and bitter curses. His shoulder thudded against the door with a hollow thud as he fell, and like magic the obstinate thing popped open, revealing the drab carpet and ubiquitous beige wall beyond. _Open sesame._

Dragging his complaining bones into an upright position, Rick stalked down the hallway, thin hand periodically pressing to the wall for balance as he regained his equilibrium. His mouth tasted like an old newspaper and he reached for his flask only to discover his ever-present lab coat was missing in action, along with its most necessary occupant. Still pawing ineffectually at the thin grey cotton where his breast pocket should be, he entered the living room, scowl unfurled to its maximum peak of thunderous malcontent. Fully expecting to see his grandson's tousled head peeking up from the unexplored regions of the family couch, he stopped short in confusion when he was greeted instead by a pair of feet dangling over the back of the seafoam green sofa, toes painted bright coral, a tiny daisy pattern decorating the first dactyl on each.

Drawing nearer, the vision clarified into the only slightly less bewildering appearance of Summer, draped languidly upside-down on the overstuffed cushions like a broken doll in a tiny white bikini. She had one arm outstretched, hanging down beside her ponytail like trailing russet ivy towards the floor, television remote perilously clutched in loose fingers. She gestured vaguely with it towards the screen, wrist limp as if she could only just muster the effort of command. Her other hand was hooked thumb and forefinger beneath the hem of her bikini, pulling the pristine white fabric in a lazy stretch over the gently curving crest of one hipbone.

"You think you could turn it down to somewhere below a 747 engine, princess?" He demanded irritably, scrubbing one dry hand over his mouth in the absence of his usual panacea for consciousness.

Not even bothering to raise her head, Summer rolled her gaze through a mire of sarcasm to rest on him, heavy-lidded and staring down the line of her naked torso; creamy skin punctuated by two white triangles and a bit of string. "Why?" She fired back, clearly unsympathetic to his plight. "You're up now."

Staring at her, all taut skin and tight curves unimpeded by an overabundance of clothing, Rick became suddenly aware that the house was devoid of other life forms; no one present to bear witness, either to the depth of his hangover or its subsequnt iniquity. He glanced around, expression a little hunted, as if anticipating the punchline to a damning joke. "Where's the rest of your idiot family?" He demanded, deliberately excluding himself from the lower intellectual caste. "You could be annoying them instead."

Summer rolled her eyes again, fixing them once more on the screen, thumb with its pointed claw tapping on the remote - bored as only a member of her jaded generation could be with literally everything. "Jerry dragged them all to his stupid work picnic, you know how he is." Indeed he did - the omega of the Smith-Sanchez household unit couldn't abide facing his adoring public alone - the slings and arrows of open ridicule were lessened when surrounded by the social buffer zone of his _beautiful family_. Summer had long since chosen to abstain, refusing to participate on principle - unlike her more accommodating mother, she considered herself above playing a smiling meat shield for her ineffectual father. Instead she languished in the house, electronic diversions only one of several possible options to ensure her entertainment. She turned her gaze to Rick again, somehow managing to maintain eye contact as she swiveled her limber frame into a sitting position, blood rushing down from her head and leaving glittering spots scattered across her field of vision. Shaking her head to clear it, ponytail bouncing, she stood and walked past him towards the kitchen, scent of coconuts trailing her, a delicate silver anklet gleaming above fragile bone.

Her disappearance around the kitchen doorway was punctuated by the hermetic seal of the refrigerator being broken with a clunk and rattle, barest hint of cold air trickling like water into the adjoining room and dissipating into a diaspora of individual molecules, irrelevant and fading. The pop and hiss of a soda can opening accompanied her return - she took a long swig, slender throat working; before pressing the cold can to the curve of her neck, condensation leaving a sheen of moisture on her skin. Every movement was languid, caught in the dreamy space between effortless and calculated; in the realm where only a certain beauty and a certain wickedness could simultaneously dwell. Rick despised that delicate balance, thin and unreliable as gossamer. Spider silk can be broken with a puff of breath, but is ten times stronger than steel of the same diameter. Everything is a matter of perspective. He hated when she showed him himself in her; a mirror painted up to look like giftwrapped sin. It made it harder to think of her as anything but his.

She crossed one ankle over the other, rubbing at a mosquito bite with monkey-like dexterity; her first toe slightly longer than the hallucis. Superstitious old schoolmarms would say that those with an exceptionally long first toe are natural born liars, skilled and prolific in the art of deceit. A man of science, Rick would have naturally preferred to disagree, if it weren't for the fact that he knew it to be true. He had the same toes, on thin long feet worn out from running. Liar's toes, like attached earlobes and a missing conscience, were genetically hereditary oddities.

Leaning against the arched doorway, Summer polished off the soda and sent the empty can sailing with a tinny clatter into the kitchen wastebasket, her head falling back with an exaggerated sigh. "It's so _hot._ " And it was - Jerry's stubborn refusal to acknowledge the realities of climate change left the household thermostat stuck firmly above comfortable levels well past Memorial Day. Rick himself was uncomfortably warm, despite the absence of his lab coat and general lack of insulating tissue. He chose to attribute the way his tousled hair stuck to the clammy back of his neck to mercury brushing the triple digits - and _not_ any untoward consideration of the girl aiming all her inborn talents like a sniper at ruination. "I bought all these cute swimsuits," she gestured down at herself, an exasperated wave of both hands, as if he could have failed to notice. "The senior trip was supposed to be Cancun this year - but Taylor Flaherty spent the whole SGA treasury on her botched nose job, the stupid bitch." Young face twisted up into a scowl, she stalked past him and dropped facedown on the couch, blind to his answering grimace.

After a long pause, during which her deep unconcern for his looming presence could not have been more pronounced, Rick stalked into the garage and emerged with a solid, subtly shimmering grey-blue object the size of a shoebox. He tapped it with long fingertips, small white lights illuminating in a neat row the bottom edge of the mysterious thing, and striding to the glass doors guarding the patio he slid them open and tossed the now quietly beeping box out onto the lawn with practiced disinterest. Something that resembled a sonic boom followed, ruffling his hair as he slid the doors shut, steel and glass rattling in their frames throughout the house. Summer raised a brow, rising from her prostrate position with what passed for interest, peering through the French doors and then passing through them to the azure vision beyond. An in-ground pool had spontaneously appeared in the center of their suburban backyard, large enough to obliterate the space previously occupied by Jerry's prize begonias, lined with concrete and rippling pale blue beneath the summer sun.

"Old experiment." He grunted, by way of explanation - bare bones, only, always. "Guess it works."

"Nice." The brat commented, before dismissing him without further ado in favor of more aquatic endeavors.

When the family returned home the sun was low in the sky, bathing the yard - and its new addition - in fire and roses. Summer was bronzed like some ancient goddess, save for the delicate crests of her collarbone and wings of her shoulderblades, which were red - neglected by her slim warm palms, spreading suntan oil beneath the primeval orb baking them from above. She floated, fingers trailing idly in the cool blue, on a white vinyl raft fashioned to resemble, in its generally monstrous way, a unicorn. Rick stretched his long legs in a longer-neglected lawn chair, a beer on the patio beside him sweating its chill away in long glistening trails. He had what might have been a newspaper from what might have been Earth - but just as easily might not - in his lap but ignored it, powerful mind occupied as ever with its own machinations. Jerry's plaintive complaints and Beth and Morty's exclaimations of surprise at the uncharacteristic gift faded into background noise as Summer dropped into the water and emerged at the pool's edge; a mermaid, becoming human. He curved loose fingers around the neck of his beer and downed it, dropping both bottle and newspaper in the kitchen garbage as he retreated into the dark house.

The afternoons for the remainder of the week were more or less mapped out after that. Summer spent her time alternating between cool water and scorching sun, a nymph uncertain about her native element. She floated on the raft, modeling one of the aforementioned swimsuits after another, a drink in her hand - and if it wasn't a virgin daiquiri, as she sneeringly informed anyone who asked, Rick wasn't telling. The man himself spent a great deal of time on the patio, haunting a deck chair in the shade; nose in a book, mirrored sunglasses - violet, grading into pink - reflecting Summer's young golden form hovered above the cerulean square, an idle idol.

Morty found him there one afternoon, tip of one worn sneaker toeing at the crooked heel of the other as he hesitated at the French doors. He glanced at his sister, by all appearances asleep aboard her unicorn; and at Rick, a thick green-bound tome full of obscure characters and equations open on his narrow knees.

"H-hey, Rick... I was thinking maybe we could go on an adventure, you know? Take care of something you got going on out there... It's been a while, you know?"

Rick sipped his drink and set it aside with the same impatience he used to set aside his grandson. He had graduated back up to scotch again, no dallying with beer in the relative coolness of the patio's shaded haven. Ice cubes crackled and clinked in the slickly perspiring highball. "Not now, Morty; I'm reading."

Morty bit his lip, dirty canvas sneakers still restless. He glanced again at his sister, then at the book in Rick's lap, still on the same illegible passage. As if sensing his scrutiny, Rick casually flipped a single page, offering no balm to his curiosity or subtle apprehension. Not mollified, but thus categorically dismissed, the boy withdrew into the house and left the elder man to his brooding sentinel. 


	5. You Got That Medicine I Need

It came on like a fever, a sudden storm that shattered the idyllic calm that had overlaid the summer up till that point with a hazy, wet-dream glow. It was only a matter of time, after all - inevitable, like everything else. Exposure to a toxin, however limited, will eventually build up and spill over the walls of even the most well-intended and carefully administered inoculation.

 _Carefully_ being the key word, the whisper of his cotton-clad feet on the carpet as he crept into her room in the dead of night, watching her chest rise and fall in its dainty white camisole, lace-edged and thin, young flesh peaked and inviting beneath the chilly blast of central air. A single silver moonbeam - an interloper, like himself - speared between the sheer curtains and highlighted the slow and steady flutter of the pulse in her throat, the way a single strand of red fluttered and withdrew against softly parted lips. He gritted his teeth, pressing the needle to her skin, and looked away as he pressed the plunger home - beating a hasty retreat as the vaccine, hopefully, made her normal - _stupid_ \- once again.

But was it too late? Had he lost track of time, become too caught up in the role he was expected to play? Stern, distant patriarch, mad scientist, professional bad influence. He had measured the dose with the same care his long fingers and narrowed eyes always evinced and yet... and yet. Precise measurements, precise timing, all the caution in the world, thrown off its careful track merely by his being here, by his presence in a world not his own - by the weight of his eyes, lingering on the neat lines of the pleated skirt she wore to cheerleading tryouts, by the press of a pencil's soft rubber tip between her teeth. Later, he would never be able to say for certain if he had botched it deliberately - his darkness, his _toxicity_ , hidden even from himself. But he suspected... Always. Sabotage was in his very nature.

He found her in the laundry room, of all places; one of the most neglected corners of Beth's domain. The dryer rumbled, a rusty old thing muttering in its sleep; dust motes and the scent of fabric softener heavy in the air. She was crumpled on the floor like a piece of paper, balled up and twisted; curled into herself on a pile of clean linens pulled from the basket for folding and then abandoned. Like a cat, she'd sought the comfort of softness and warmth, but now lay in shadows, sobbing quietly.

"Summer." Not a question, merely an announcement of his presence. He didn't have it in him to be delicate, to be soft and searching, to place a finger beneath her jaw and raise her eyes to his, brush away her tears and soothe her. That was a task for a real grandfather, a real loved one - and he was as transparent as a ghost, hardly there at all, a photocopy of the real thing. Still, he sank to a crouch beside her, studying her red-rimmed eyes, the slightly raised bump, tinted an angry pink like a welt or a beesting, at the injection site on her arm. An adverse reaction, the sign of rejection - her body and mind, fighting against his meddling, refusing to be coddled or conform.

Teenage angst was one explanation, the weight of the world heavy on her young shoulders - and perhaps that's all it was. Perhaps, this was a common sadness - a breakup, a failed test, some social obligation gone horribly awry - and not the heavy, cloying thing, the suffocating darkness that was the Sanchez family birthright. Perhaps she was merely awaiting the twenty-eighth day all women dreaded - bloating, pain, crimson staining delicate fabrics. Or perhaps, she had become aware of the enormity of the universe, and the futility of it all; of how many versions of her across all dimensions were battered and broken and dead. And in some way it was growing up, this induction into shadow, a gauntlet she walked, as his daughter had, and himself. But in another, more significant way, it was the beginnings of resistance - to the suppressant, the increased dose rejected by her sensitive skin and the purity of her young blood. Perhaps it was only the grieving of fleeting youth - but perhaps it was his careless hands, mixing the solution incorrectly, administering it under cover of night, some tiny mistake toppling over the house of cards that had been bearing the weight of all his sins.

Perhaps he was too tired and too old and worn out at the edges to care.

When she failed to meet his eyes, he sank down beside her, one long leg stretched out on the poured-concrete floor despite the chill of autumn creeping up from beneath the house. The other bent at the knee, drawn up to his chest as he leaned against the still-warm dryer, withdrawing his flask from his pocket and taking a scalding sip, passing it to his teenage granddaughter - someone's daughter, someone's _baby girl_ \- without comment. Skipping a beat, she looked up, swallowing her tears with the remarkable aplomb that was one of her mother's gifts, wiping her eyes - crystalline green, streaked mascara - on the back of her hand. She accepted the offering, fingertips warm and refusing to tremble.

"So what's up." Again, no question in his voice; a bland monotone that covered over all his bad intentions. "Evan dump you?"

" _Ethan._ " She corrected without heat, simply sounding tired. "And I dumped him, the troglodyte."

"So what?"

She looked askance at him, long lashes dewy, the gleam of drying tears on her flushed cheeks highlighting the delicate constellations marked out in tawny freckles. "It's just so... frustrating."

He took another sip, returned his flask to his pocket, and waited for her to elaborate. For good or ill, the unspoken craves the light.

"He's so clingy," she continued, features distorted in a moue of disgust. "He's like a little kid, always whining about everything." She shrugged, glancing askance as if expecting the flask to be passed her way again. When it wasn't, she went on, a trifle huffily. "I want someone that can get me off without crying about it later." Sly, lashes still dewy from her tears, she glanced at him again. "Is that so much to ask?" 

He tried to keep the smirk from his face, at her smug matter-of-factness, the self-indulgent snark with which she brushed off all manner of heartache and misfortune. She was so much like her mother, so much like _him_ , that it was impossible not to recognize the Sanchez genome in her, repeating and repeating like a line of code copy-pasted over itself. He couldn't help it, really; couldn't help but picture her sprawled back on the tousled sheets and towels, red-faced and panting, her skinny hips grinding against his face between her thighs. He blinked, licked his lips, and the vision was gone, burned into a blurry after-image on the backs of his eyelids. His fingertips twitched, the ghost of slick heat and soft, dripping ginger curls a tactile hallucination; one he banished by reaching once more for his flask. It was becoming a ritual - twist, sip, grimace, pass. This time she took it without missing a beat - these small moments of debauchery, shared, something she was coming to expect. _Fuck me._ He was a black hole, the gravity of his own twisted perversions and wanton self-destruction absorbing everything in its path, ripping it apart atom by atom and breaking it down into nothing.

"You ever try to get _yourself_ off, kid?" And wasn't that repellent, the gruff endearment burning his mouth like cheap rotgut as he muttered the words. Summer didn't seem to agree, green eyes wide and luminous with surprise as a steady flush crept up over her cheeks, freckles vanishing in a wash of pink. She realized she was staring and broke the eye contact, casting her gaze down into her lap where her polished fingertips wound together in anxiety.

"Sometimes," she muttered, the word tripping from her lips as if unwillingly offered, but spoken aloud nonetheless.

He couldn't believe his own audacity. If he was a better man, he would have never wandered into the laundry room in the first place, would have sensed the danger of temptation and steered clear. If he had been a decent man, he would have offered her a tissue and an empty platitude, and withdrawn. But he wasn't, so he didn't - he stayed, and dragged his teenage granddaughter headfirst down the rabbit hole with him.

"Like how?"

If possible, her young face flushed even darker, but she tossed him an exasperated grimace, "You know," and dropped her hand between her folded thighs, miming busily stroking fingers. She did not seem particularly confident in the results, and shrugged self-consciously.

He could not quite suppress a chuckle, could not quite conceal the cruelty in it - that Sanchez smugness. She was so young. "Kid, if you don't warm up the engine before you put it in gear, it's gonna stall on you."

"What?"  
  
"I mean you can't just dive in, Summer, you gotta - you gotta take your time, get into it a little bit."

The house was empty, steadily dripping faucet in the downstairs bathroom audible to his sensitive predator's ears even here. Jerry was at the office, feigning anxious productivity. Morty had pled schoolwork, disappearing down the street to the library with a guilty backwards glance over his shoulder. Beth had left hours before, and was numbing the pain of her housewifely boredom by going on a spending spree she couldn't afford and would regret later. There was only himself... And Summer, of course, caught in the web of his iniquity, staring like a deer in the headlights.

"Like this." Long fingertips touched the inner curve of her elbow, feeling her pulse fluttering beneath sensitive skin. He slid his hand down to lift hers, studiously ignoring her face, refusing to read her expression, be it scandalized or mesmerized, or blank like the flat eyes of a snake before its charmer. He focused instead on the task at hand, pressing thin lips to the warm pattern of veins at her wrist; breathing over her palm - hot, damp - before pressing a kiss there as well, letting his tongue flicker out to trace, briefly, at the salty crease running down the center of her hand. Her lifeline, cut short, no doubt; courtesy of their poisonous association. He heard her gasp, sensed her shift in their shared nest of linens as she pressed her thighs together, but he kept his gaze trained down - if he didn't look at her, it wasn't real. He turned her hand over slowly, as if he had never seen it before, long strokes opening her palm, drawing her fingers out - without warning, he popped the tips of her first and second digits into his mouth, slick silver tongue sliding over the sensitive pads, pressing obscenely into the crux, the web between the two.

"Rick," she whined, a little breathlessly; and withdrew her hand, blushing furiously. She looked down, index and middle fingers of her left hand wet and shiny. Her nipples were hard little buds beneath the soft clinging cotton of her tee-shirt, making his mouth water, and he swallowed again. 

"Engine's running, kid," he informed her, tone low and husky; wide hungry pupils betraying his bland expression. "Better get driving."

Wobbly, a newborn colt, she rose to her feet and fled; glancing over her shoulder with the guilt that seemed to be an inborn family trait. He waited till he heard the hollow slam of her bedroom door, then jerked the fly down on his pants with a groan, thrusting dry into his fist. It took only moments, the way her voice had sounded whining out his name shoving him violently over the edge. He cursed, spilling himself all over Beth's clean sheets, obliterating the pretty pink asters embroidered along the pristine white hem. _Fuck._


End file.
